Black Tyler29 cards: 7 firsts, 8 claimed firsts and 14 beginnings
Schools, churches, businesses and public offices of Tyler’s African American community, and the segregation they were built against.
- The first school for Black children in the Tyler areaOpened with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau; attacked, it held on a few years.
- St. James CME Church is organizedMeeting in a house on East Erwin; it later created Texas College.
- Second Colored Baptist Church, today’s True Vine, is foundedNear the railroad tracks, between North Bonner and Oakwood Cemetery.
- Tyler Colored High School, called the first known Black schoolA private school with John F. Anderson as principal.
- West End Negro School, Tyler’s first public school for Black childrenTyler’s first public school for African Americans, the wood-frame West End Negro School at Herndon and Front streets, was paid for with a $6,000 bond issue after a committee of Black residents asked for it.
- St. James CME, the oldest surviving Black church building in TylerAt 408 North Border Avenue; bricked and remodeled about 1920.
- A brick church called the first in Texas built by Black TexansBethlehem Baptist, on West Front Street, 1891.
- Patterson’s 5 Acre, a subdivision for Black buyersLots sold to Ezekiel Williams, Daniel Furch and others.
- Texas College opens with six studentsCreated and supported by St. James CME Church.
- A Baptist academy opens, later Butler CollegeNamed for its founder, Rev. C. M. Butler, at his death in 1924.
- Texas College organizes its first college-level classUntil then it taught the common-school grades.
- Emmett Scott High School is completedNamed for Booker T. Washington’s private secretary; closed by court order in 1970.
- Martin Hall goes up at Texas CollegeThe oldest intact building on the campus.
- The fair’s first “Colored Day,” after a petitionAt the request of African American residents, who presented a petition, the East Texas Fair Association added a “Colored Day” to the fair in 1928.
- Texas College is accredited as a four-year collegeRenamed Phillips University in 1909, then Texas College again.
- Tyler Barber College, called the country’s first for African AmericansHenry Miller Morgan, born in Tyler’s St. Louis community in 1895, opened Tyler Barber College at 212 East Erwin Street.
- Dr. Archie S. Senate moves his practice to East ErwinOn the 200 block, where Black entrepreneurs bought buildings.
- The Ella Reid Library, once the Negro Public LibraryChartered and supported by Tyler’s African American community.
- The city’s survey dates Tyler’s first Black officers to the 1940sAssigned to Black neighborhoods; integration followed in the 1960s.
- Texas College houses a campus of Tyler Junior CollegeFrom 1946 to 1966.
- The first Black attorney to try a case in the county courthouseHe won, in the 7th Judicial District Court.
- Andrew Melontree Sr., a first in the hospital laboratoriesA lab technician and a laboratory director, both in 1956.
- A federal judge orders Tyler’s schools desegregatedJudge William Wayne Justice; the case closed in 2016.
- Andrew Melontree Sr., the county’s first Black commissionerPrecinct 4, from 1983 to 2002.
- Herb Hayter, the police department’s first minority supervisorPromoted to sergeant in 1995, KLTV reported.
- JoAnn Hampton, in her words the first Black woman commissionerPrecinct 4, from January 1, 2003.
- Bethlehem First Baptist, Tyler’s first Black Baptist congregationIt first met in the basement of the Smith County Courthouse.
- Ira Brown, called Tyler’s first Black policeman in a headlineKETK’s story itself called him one of the first.
- Quincy Beavers, Smith County’s first Black judgeA justice of the peace for 28 years, until 2022.